Scams from the Great Beyond: How to Make Easy Money Off of ESP, Astrology, UFOs, Crop Circles, Cattle Mutilations, Alien Abductions, Atlantis, Channeling, and Other New Age Nonsense.

Originally printed by Paladin Press, Copyright 1997, reprinted through Create Space with no editorial changes.


More Scams from the Great Beyond: How to Make Even More Money Off of Creationism, Evolution, Environmentalism, Fringe Politics, Weird Science, the Occult, and Other Strange Beliefs

Originally printed by Paladin Press, Copyright 2002,  reprinted through Create Space with no editorial changes.

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF AN INTERVIEW WITH BETTY HILL Sex, Science, and the UFO Debate CONFESSIONS OF A RED HOT UFO INVESTIGATOR By Tom Calarco UFO Invasion" book review (at skepticalinquirer.org behind paywall UFO Invasion" book review 1999 Alien Abductions: Creating a Modem Phenomenon, Skeptical Inquirer Volume 23, No. 3, May / June 1999( at skepticalinquirer.org behind paywall) Alien Abductions: Creating a Modem Phenomenon, Skeptical Inquirer Volume 23, No. 3, May / June 1999 2013 A Dangerous Blending of Nazi Fact and Fiction Skeptical Inquirer Volume 37, No. 5 ( at skepticalinquirer.org behind paywall ) A Dangerous Blending of Nazi Fact and Fiction Skeptical Inquirer Volume 37, No. 5 . This piece appeared in e-skeptic Another Physics of UFOs PETER HUSTON’S REBUTTAL TO GAINER AIPT or "AIOT Comics" is a comics, media, and pop-culture website and news source. Under the guidance of Russ Dobler, they have been adding articles that look at the actual science or history behind the fringe or pseudo-scientific claims that often appear in popular comics. I have helped out with a couple contributions.          AIPT Nazi UFOs

Peter Huston's writing on skeptically examing strange claims has appeared in two edited anthologies. The most recent was entitled "The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony." He contributed a piece entitled "Meeting the Abductees, : Betty Hill, Richard Price & Others." This was released in May 2023.

ANNOUNCEMENT  - NEW BOOK RELEASE (May 2023)

The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony

                                                  V.J. Ballester-Olmos & Richard W. Heiden (Eds.)

For 76 years, casual observers around the world have reported sightings of aerial phenomena unexplainable to them. More elaborate personal experiences have been reported by others whose testimony speak of close interactions with fantastic flying machines that land, from which strange beings descend, and even kidnap the onlookers. In the absence of compelling physical evidence of the reality of these narrations, how should science study immaterial observations and test these claims? The very standard of reputable witness reliability is at stake here.

The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony is the first major book to comprehensively focus on the discussion and current views on problems and challenges posed by the reliability of UFO testimonies. This is a cross-disciplinary compendium of papers by 60 authors from 14 different countries. They are specialists in social, physical, and biological sciences, including psychology (predominantly) as well as psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, folklore, religion, journalism, engineering, computing, medicine, education, analysts with experience in the critical study of UFO perceivers, and other professionals. This volume shares thematically convergent ideas about the plausibility of alternate explanations for an alleged close-range UFO phenomenon.

The 57 chapters in this book are divided into seven section headings: Case Studies, Psychological Perspectives, On Witness Testimony, Empirical Research, Anthropological Approach, Metrics and Scaling, and Epistemological Issues. There, the subject matter is analyzed from statistical work to clinical assessment, psychometrics, comparative and evaluation inquiry, and other topic perspectives. 

Some extracts from the Foreword, written by Dr. Leonard S. Newman, Professor of Psychology at Syracuse University: The contributors to this book include some very smart people. There are all sorts of issues to which they could be devoting their intellectual energy, and all sorts of scholarly and research contributions they could make. They don’t have to write thoughtful and rigorous chapters for a book called The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony, but this is what they have done. And so, the work continues, as attested to by the papers in this volume. I’m not sure if there exists any collection of papers on any topic that can claim to comprehensively summarize everything that is currently known about it. But this one comes pretty close.

This 711-page book has been released online in the Academia.edu portal, from where it can be downloaded for free:

https://www.academia.edu/101922617/The_Reliability_of_UFO_Witness_Testimony

Simultaneously, UPIAR Publishing House (Turin, Italy) has published two softcover, A4 format print editions, one in black & white, another in full color (ISBN: 9791281441002). The book can be purchased through this link: http://www.upiar.com/index.cfm?artID=201



Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Irvine, USA. When ordinary citizens claim to have extraterrestrial encounters, such as seeing UFOs or meeting with alien beings, what should we think? Did the alien abduction really happen or was it a hoax?  Is someone deliberately lying? Are they false memories? Readers will be enthralled by the fascinating case histories that are presented in The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony, a volume where sixty experts examine these issues with depth and insight. These cases teach us a great deal about how humans come to believe they have experienced bizarre events that may have never occurred at all.

Steven Jay Lynn, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Binghamton University (SUNY), USA. This captivating book will appeal to anyone interested in UFOs (and who isn’t?), the vagaries of memory, eyewitness perception and misperception, critical analysis of puzzling phenomena, and evaluating scientific vs. pseudoscientific claims.  This volume ranks in the elite category of essential reading for students, scientists, and the seriously curious among us, and therefore has my highest recommendation. Bravo!

Henry Otgaar, Ph.D., Professor of Legal Psychology, Maastricht University, the Netherlands, and Leuven Catholic University, Belgium. Claims of UFO sightings and experiences continue to fascinate us. This book has collected a unique and diverse set of case studies and critical articles on how such experiences unfold and what the authenticity of these claims is. The collection of these different articles is truly groundbreaking and is the first-ever complete assemblage concerning the validity of UFO testimony. 

Benjamin E. Zeller, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of Religion, Lake Forest College, Illinois, USA. In referring to extraterrestrial contact, Carl Sagan said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This fine book seeks to contextualize what such evidence entails. Its contributors analyze UFO sightings and cases both famous and obscure, recent and historical, and quite international in scope. They draw from an impressive range of methodological, academic, and scientific perspectives, and consider such topics as the nature of cognition, memory, types of belief and testimony, psychology, and the rationality of belief. Skeptics, believers, and scholars of ufology will all find this book fascinating!




The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony Edited by Vicente Juan Ballester-Olmos & Richard W. Heiden (2023)

But the text is available for free download with the permission of the editor and publishers here:

The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony downloadable text